“The poor old house begins to look dismantled. I had many thoughts about it that last night there—of the people who had dined and talked in it—Henry James, and Burne-Jones, Stopford Brooke, Martineau, Watts, Tadema, Lowell, Roosevelt, Page, Northbrook, Goschen and so many more—of one’s own good times, and follies and mistakes—everything passing at last into the words, ‘He knoweth whereof we are made, He remembereth that we are but dust.’”
Then, in September, Mrs. Ward went for the last time to the Lake District, motoring there via Stratford-on-Avon in her “little car”—a cheap post-war purchase which spent most of its time in the repairing shop, but which, for this occasion, put forth a supreme effort and actually brought Mrs. Ward safely home through the midst of the railway strike. She made her headquarters at Grasmere, for which she had developed a special affection during two recent summers when she had taken “Kelbarrow” and had watched from its lawn every passing mood of the little lake. She visited Fox How and “Aunt Fan” almost every day; she renewed her friendship with Canon and Mrs. Rawnsley and her life-long intimacy with Gordon Wordsworth. And, on the Langdale side of the fell, she visited a little grave to which her heart always yearned afresh.
Mrs. Ward was deeply interested, during these last months of her life, in the attempts made by the Liberal element in the Church to modify or retard the “Enabling Bill,” or as it is now known, the Church Assembly Act. All her fighting spirit was aroused by the claim made by the Bill to lay down tests and distinctions between member and member of the National Church, especially by the imposition of the test of Holy Communion on all candidates for the new Church bodies. She feared, in the words of the Bishop of Carlisle (who saw eye to eye with her in this matter) “that the declaration required as a condition of membership of the Church of England will go a long way towards de-nationalising the Church and reducing it to the status of a sect.” She organised, early in December, a letter to The Times which was signed by all the most prominent names in Liberal Churchmanship, protesting against the scanty opportunities for debate which, owing to a ruling of the Speaker’s, the measure was to have in the House of Commons. But, when it became law quand même, she turned her thoughts and her remaining energies to a constructive movement which might rally the scattered Liberal forces of the Church and assert for them the right, after due notice given of their opinions, to participate without dishonesty in the rite of Holy Communion. In a leaflet issued from Stocks to various private sympathisers in January 1920, Mrs. Ward pointed out that the difficulty which had confronted the Church sixty years before with regard to the Thirty-nine Articles had now passed on to the Creeds, and that to many who were convinced believers in the God within us, the following of Christ and the practical realisation of the Kingdom, the Nicene Creed was yet, “to quote a recent phrase, ‘no more than the majority opinion of a Committee held 1,600 years ago.’” She therefore appealed for the formation of a “Faith and Freedom Association,” the members of which might claim to take their part in the new Councils and Assemblies while openly stating their dissent from, or their right to re-interpret the Creeds; only so could the Church continue to include that Modernist element which was essential to its healthy development.
Mrs. Ward received a good deal of sympathy and encouragement from those to whom she sent her leaflet, and dreamt, in her indomitable way, of summoning a meeting later on if the response were sufficient. But she knew in her heart that her own strength would no longer suffice to lead such a crusade, and she appealed with a certain wistfulness to the young “to pour into it their life, their courage and their love.” It troubled her that no young person or group arose to take the burden from her shoulders. But in truth she was still the youngest in heart of all her generation, or the next, and if it were not that the poor body was outworn she might yet have exerted the influence she longed for on the religious life of her country.
But it was too late. Mrs. Ward’s health definitely gave way about Christmas-time, 1919, the breakdown taking the form of a violent attack of neuritis in the shoulders and arms. Although she would not yet acknowledge it, but tried to continue the old round of work, increasing weakness made it plain to her, at length, that she must not, for the present at least, go crusading. But how she hoped and strove for better times! Her devoted doctor-brother, Frank Arnold, to whom she turned again and again with pathetic trust, knowing his ingenuity in the devising of remedies, tended her with a skill born of a life-long knowledge of her; but the malady was too deep-seated. At the end of January she moved to London in order to try a certain course of treatment, taking up her abode in a little house in Connaught Square which her husband and Dorothy had found for her. She liked the little place, especially on the days when flowers from Stocks arrived to make a bower of it, and there, in the midst of a fruitless round of “treatments” which did nothing but sap her remaining strength, she passed the last weeks of her life. Old friends came once more to visit her; her son and her daughters took turns in reading to her the poets that she loved; Miss Churcher brought for her delight the latest stories from the Play Centres. She still went downstairs and even, sometimes, out of doors, but those who came to the house to sit with her left it, usually, with aching hearts. Then, on March 11, another blow fell. Mr. Ward became dangerously ill, and an immediate operation was found to be necessary. The doctors carried him off to a nursing home not far away and performed it, successfully, that night, while Mrs. Ward sat below in the waiting-room in an agony of anxiety. The next day, and the next, she was still able to go to him, the porters carrying her upstairs to his room, but on Sunday, March 14, signs of bronchitis showed themselves, together with a grave condition of the heart. The doctors would not hear, after this, of her leaving the house.
So for ten days she lay in the little London bedroom, looking out over London trees, her heart pining for the day—the spring day which would surely come—when she and he would return to Stocks together and their ills would be forgotten. “Ah,” she wrote to him in his nursing home on March 18, “it is too trying this imprisonment—but it ought only to be a few days more!”
And indeed, her release was nearer than she knew. Did she not know it? In mortal illness there are secrets of the inner consciousness which those who tend, however lovingly, can never wholly penetrate, but as her mind advanced ever nearer to the verge, one felt that it was swept, ever and anon, by far-off gusts of poetry, finding expression in words and fragments long possessed and intimately loved. Such were the “Last Lines” of Emily Brontë, of which, two days before the end, she repeated the great second verse to Dorothy, saying with the old passionate gesture of the hands, “That’s what I am thinking of!”
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in thee!
Then, early on the morning of the 24th, there came an hour of crisis, when life fought with death for victory; but, before the end, “she opened her dear eyes wide, her dear brown eyes, like the eyes of a young woman, and looked out into the unknown with a most wonderful look on her face. I think that at that moment her soul crossed the bar.” So wrote Dorothy, the only witness of that look; she will carry the memory of it in her heart to the end.
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